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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29747940">Life 2: The Unhappy Ending</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostbunne/pseuds/Ghostbunne'>Ghostbunne</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>OC One Shots [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Marble Hornets</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Abuse, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst and Tragedy, Character Death, Comfort/Angst, Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Minor Character Death, Murder, Neglect, lying</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 22:15:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,838</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29747940</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostbunne/pseuds/Ghostbunne</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Merrick's brother is missing, and that isn't the worst of it. He's losing sleep, losing time, and starting to hallucinate strange visions of a pale, tall man, seemingly without a face.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jay Merrick &amp; Original Character(s), Jay Merrick &amp; Sam Merrick, Sam Merrick &amp; Mock Merrick</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>OC One Shots [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2186424</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Life 2: The Unhappy Ending</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Sammothy Oleander Merrick was twelve years old when he realized his parents didn’t love him. Maybe it was something he should’ve noticed sooner, the way they were always disappointed in him, the way they always seemed to be disappointed in him, to see him as a burden, especially when it came to comparisons to Jay. Jay was always the perfect son, always the one doing things right when Sam could only mess them up. When he disappeared things only got worse.</p>
<p>	Sam was twelve or thirteen When Jay stopped coming home for the holidays, and that was fine. He still called Sam, was still there to support him. It was nice. Then though, the calls began to dwindle. Then they stopped. No explanation, no contact, no nothing. He was only gone, and it was clear his parents hated the fact it was Jay who disappeared and not Sam. Sam who was already a problem child, Sam who didn’t like the right people, in with the wrong crowd. Sam who caused problems to cause problems, who didn’t listen, who they wished was the one to disappear into the ether instead of Jay. They judged him harshly for his failures, for his choices. Small ways, never outright saying their hate to his face. The only time they did was thanksgiving when he was 16 years old. Their disappointment, their hatred for him, for who he was, was made blatantly clear. He kissed a boy at the dinner table and ended up spending the night at a friend’s house, and from that point out a heavy tension hung around the family house. He hated knowing they hated him, especially when he knew he couldn’t bring himself to hate them. Always he tried to impress them, tried to earn their love. Always he rebelled against them regardless. Trapped between two wants, the want to prove them wrong, and they want to be loved.</p>
<p>	The fact his parents didn’t love him wasn’t the biggest of his concerns. The fact that Jay was gone was. Jay had helped him, had made the bad times less bad, had encouraged him and been there for him. Now he was gone and for the next six or seven years, Sam suffered to himself, unsure of what to do. It was in this period of nearly a decade that everything became much, much worse.</p>
<p>	It was small at first. A glimpse out of the corner of his eye, A feeling of being watched, a faint sound, almost like static, fading in and out in quiet moments. Nothing he truly took notice of. Nothing that was in the front of his mind. Then the thing in the corner of his vision started to linger. He’d catch better glimpses of it, see it for seconds longer in his peripheral. The feelings of being watched grew and grew, and the sounds of static were louder, more frequent, more invasive. He started to get headaches. And that was when the voice started. Quiet at first, to the point he only assumed it to be thoughts more noticeable than others. Sometimes he mistook it for him just hearing things, his name being called when it wasn’t, a word being said by someone who wasn’t there, nothing big. It was in the middle of this slow build of the momentum of something he didn’t understand, wouldn’t understand, and couldn’t yet see, that he decided he had to take charge. He had to find Jay. Maybe then his parents would see him as someone good, maybe then they would love him, he’d be the hero then. The golden child. The appreciated one. He’d have everything he wanted, everything he needed. He would be happy.</p>
<p>	From that point on, everything began to spiral. The hallucinations began to get worse, a strange vision of a tall, pale, faceless man in a suit haunting him more and more frequently. Migraines and blackouts plagued him, he began to lose chunks of memory, chunks of time, seemingly gone into the ether. He began to wake up places he hadn’t brought himself, began to wake up in the middle of tasks he had never actually started. He was worried, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to give his parents any more reason to see him as the problem child than they already had. He instead bit his tongue and kept on. He got through high school and got into his first year of college. He was a good student, successful, but still, he was plagued by strange visions. He began to have nightmares, Jay dead somewhere, the strange figure hovering over him for a moment before both of them disappeared into the ether. They made him worry more. As did the fact he was losing even more time in his life, and people were telling him about strange things he had done that he couldn’t remember. The voice in the back of his head was louder now, more eloquent. He ignored it. He didn’t have time to be going crazy.</p>
<p>	In Sam’s life, he had learned things could only get worse, so he opted to ignore anything that could make things worse than they were. That was what led to the events of the last night when he stayed with his parents, his last night in his home. He was packing, getting ready to take his van and drive back to college after visiting his parents for the weekend. From college, he planned to take his van and begin searching for Jay. He had googled his older brother and had found his name and face tied to a strange youtube channel he had yet to watch, but he would. Surely it would have clues for him, clues that would guide him to Jay. He placed a sock into his suitcase, not bothering to match it to a partner or fold anything. He could deal with it later. He was in the middle of stuffing another shirt into it when he blacked out, and someone else took control.</p>
<p>	They blinked, looking around quietly, recognizing the room. They hated this place, and with a grimace, they stepped away from the suitcase. They didn’t want to be here, and so they chose to go out into the backyard. Through the house they quietly walked, finding their way outside to the nearest tree. They climbed it, sitting on the tallest branch that would support them. They chirped quietly, content to be where they were, watching the sunset with a happy sigh. Their happiness was quickly shattered when Sam’s father began to yell. Out of the tree, they hopped, making their way back towards the house. He was complaining about something they didn’t understand, and so they brushed right past him into the kitchen. That only made the yelling worse as they rifled through the fridge, finding something to eat. They pulled a knife out of the drawer, getting to work on chopping up the apple they had found. </p>
<p>	“Don’t ignore me, you ungrateful bastard.” Sam’s father growled. They tensed up quietly, but continued on, popping an apple slice into their mouth. They turned, analyzing Sam’s father quietly. He was a loud, heavy-handed man who didn’t seem to be very in touch emotionally. After all, the smallest things sent him flying into a rage like the one he was currently in. Their head snapped up after a moment. Something was wrong. They continued to ignore Sam’s father, peering out the window. “Answer me, Sam. You need to show more respect to people. We’ve been nothing but good to you and you treat us like this.”</p>
<p>	“Shut up,” they said quietly, continuing to look out the kitchen window. It was there, watching them. They could feel its static in their brain, but that was the least of their problems. Their statement had made Sam’s father angrier. They gasped as they were grabbed by the back of the shirt, pulled backwards and spun around. They gripped the knife tighter but tried to free themself with their empty hand. It didn’t work. “Let go!”</p>
<p>	“You disrespectful little-” Sam’s father hissed. The buzzing continued to grow in intensity, and Sam’s father raised up his hand. Their eyes widened, and without thinking they did their job. They were meant to protect Sam, to keep him as safe as possible physically, emotionally, mentally. They drove the knife forward on accident, only meaning to push him away, into his father’s chest. His hand fell limply as he collapsed to the floor. The static grew, and inside of them a dam quietly broke. They blacked out, and when they came back to they were covered in blood, and both of Sam’s parents were dead. This wasn’t supposed to happen, and they panicked, letting go of their control.</p>
<p>	When sam woke up he was drenched in blood, and based on the knife in his hands and the state of his parents in front of him, he had killed them. At first, he didn’t entirely process it, his mind simply going ‘oh no.’ After a moment, he fell to his knees, the knife clattering to the ground. A choked sob escaped him as he inched closer to the bodies. He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know what had happened, and again he blacked out.</p>
<p>	Mock had to fix this. They had to make this better. They were panicking, they had done something awful, something that hurt Sam. They didn’t mean to do it, they didn’t know how it had truly happened, but they got to work covering it up. Quickly they moved the two bodies onto a bed in another room, throwing the blankets over them. Then he changed his clothes, throwing the bloodied ones into the fireplace. Then they threw the knife into the bathroom sink before cleaning up the mess in the kitchen, the whole time feeling terrible. They had done something beyond wrong, and they didn’t know how to make it better. The only good thing was that the thing was gone, and it couldn’t get worse from here. Then, they sat down in Sam’s van, breathing in deeply. They could rearrange and erase some memories, they had done it before. It would make things better. Sam would be occupied, he wanted to find his older brother. He wouldn’t come home for a long time. He could forget this even happened. And they could make things better.</p>
<p>	Sam woke up in his van, unsure of how he had gotten there, but deciding to leave early. He didn’t know why he did, It was just in his mind. He could talk to his parents later. He turned on his car, and began to drive, blissfully unaware of what had transpired. That made Mock happy. They had kept Sam safe, and he never had to be hurt by the events that they still had to unpack themselves. They hadn’t wanted this to happen. They wondered what had caused it, but pushed the thought aside. They had other things to worry about.</p>
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